How to verify only?

[don69]

I'm running Retrospect 6 on 10.5.7. I'm using Retrospect to duplicate hard drives for backup purposes. I am now wondering if I can ask Retrospect to verify the data integrity of an already duplicated drive.

 

I have a RAID volume with some potential problems, and I get kernel panics when I try to do a full fresh duplicate to a new drive. However, I have two other duplicate backups that have been duplicated successfully in the past. They pass OK if I do a duplicate with Retrospect, but since I haven't changed any data, nothing is copied or verified. And I don't think Retrospect is verifying the old data.

 

What can I do to verify that the data on my duplicated backup drives are intact?

 

Does Retrospect 8 offer any advantages in this area?

[rhwalker]

You can't because Retrospect is a backup program, and duplicates (copies) aren't backups. It's just not set up to do what you want.

 

If what you want to do is cloning or syncing of drives, then there are better tools to accomplish that different goal.

 

Russ

[Ramon88]

A long time ago, before OSX, I used the compare function of Toast for this. I've never used Toast on OSX, but maybe it still has the compare function.

 

It was provided so you could verify your original folder data with the data on a written CD. However you could also change the path to point to two directories and compare these.

 

For windows there is a standard command line tool to generate a MD5 hash. One can compare this hash with a hash generated from another directory. This can be 'misused' as a compare tool. Maybe you can find something similar on OSX?

 

This also might help you further, "binary comparison" is what you need: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools